I'm presuming that one of the pluses of Brexit, from an EU Officialdom point of view, is that the UK will take Jersey and the Isle of man et al out with them. The EU will still have its tax dodges and havens, of course, but they will be "our" tax havens...

One of the new Rutte III government's more unexpected proposals was to lower to zero (IOW scrap) the Dutch dividend tax for businesses - to create the same situation in England. Because this would mean a loss of 1.4 billion euros in revenues, Rutter III has also proposed to increase VAT tariff from 6 to 9 percent to help plug the gap. So everyone here will pay up for a handout to multinationals. This is what you get when Rutte is unshackled from a left(ish) opposition party...

Over the course of the past weeks, opposition parties began to dig into this. Turns out this proposal was only put forward during the long-lasting negotiations by Rutte himself - and after Dutch multinationals (Unilever and Shell in particular) lobbied him to scrap the dividend tax. Their argument: Brexit, and a veiled threat to move head-offices across the North Sea, to London. I simply don't get the logic of their argument, how moving towards a country with hard cliff Brexit would benefit them.

But point is, that it could be a sign that under Rutte III, the will to start a new race to the bottom might just be there.

A VAT seems to me to be the last thing to add in order to stimulate the economy. The only thing worse would be to increase financialization by the same percentage. Finance can increase costs even where a VAT cannot be levied.